Monday, June 11, 2007

You Were Expecting Actual Excitement?

On Wednesday, I took D. for his re-assessment with the neuropsychologist. This time around, he started off really well. He identified pictures when requested to. He did a lot of the things he was asked to do. He behaved really well right up until about the last 15 minutes, which was really all we could ask of him. Well eventually get results.

The things I saw that D. could not (or would not) do:

Identify pictures of verbs. That is, when shown a picture of a baby sleeping, a baby eating, and a baby playing, and asked, “Where is the baby sleeping?” He doesn’t respond. Or he points randomly on the page and says, “Baby.”

Stack small blocks. He prefers to line them up in a straight line.

When shown a shoe, a spoon, and a ball and asked, “What do we use for eating?” He doesn’t respond.

Follow two part unrelated instructions: Close the book and give me the ball. He closed the book – twice, as the doc repeated herself a few minutes later, but never made any move towards the ball.

What does any of that mean? I don’t know yet, but I hope to find out.

On Thursday, I took D. to his second session of DBB. I thought he did quite well, although I was a little bit too preoccupied with learning the hello and goodbye songs to take careful notes. These songs are weird and the tunes are totally unfamiliar, although none of the other parents seemed fazed.

On Sunday, we had Z’s luau birthday party, which was like a luau much in the way that attending the symphony is like being murdered on the subway, which is to say, not so much. But there were tropical drinks with umbrellas and that was good.

Today, I took all four kids to one of those indoor playspaces. They had fun – D. LOVED climbing up to the top of the giant slide and sliding down. I took Baby J. down on my lap once, and he was terrified. I went down with D. a few times and we had a blast. And Z. whined about how it was boring and her knee hurt and she was hungry, and S. was happy all the day. So, the usual.

A long, long summer stretches out before us.

2 comments:

Vandychick said...

Hi WG-

I love your posts about getting evaluations. We have an appt with our dev. ped. tomorrow. It's amazing how scary it is when someone asks your child to do something, anything.

The bar is pretty low for us right now (14 mo old) but am still going to sit there and silently pray that he doesn't refer to every object in the office as "duck." It's happened at home.

I have posted on here before (not under my "real" name) about my worries that our son has an overgrowth syndrome. So far, no one thinks our delays are enough to warrant more investigation than has already been done.

I know this is invasive, but would you mind blogging a little about D's early months and milestones? Has he received therapy in multiple areas?

Our son started crawling two weeks ago at almost 13.5 months. So, pretty delayed there. But the gross motor seems to be the only delay at this point.

Because of his limited area of delay, the neuro really doesn't think any overgrowth syndromes come to mind. I am just not sure I believe him, but also not sure I want to get involved with a geneticist on top of everything else.

Sorry to be so long winded. Must be the nervousness about the morning of block stacking and nose identifying that awaits us.

WriterGrrl said...

Vandychick,

Sorry it too me forever to get back to you. Been home with all four kids for two weeks, and it's been nuts. I am working on a long post about D's early months, and it will be up shortly. Meanwhile, feel free to send me specific questions via email.